Every digital marketer knows how important social media are for supporting the overall customer journey. Which social media channel is the most important, however, may surprise you.
It’s email.
Yes, tried and true, had it since the 1990s email. Teenagers may roll their eyes when you mention this most venerable of social media, but for everyone else? It’s the digital marketing starting point.
Even with our perennial battles against spam and rigorous laws about commercial emails, this channel still stands tall in terms of customer interaction and conversion. Head to head, sending an email beats posting to Facebook or tweeting many times over.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that there are numerous email marketing products on the market today. These products fall into two broad camps: bulk email services like MailChimp and Constant Contact, targeting small and midsize businesses – and enterprise players like Adobe Systems and IBM, who have integrated their email marketing capabilities into sophisticated cross-channel marketing suites.
Except that the term suite is oh-so-2005. Today we call them marketing clouds.
The challenge at the low end of this market is moving up – not necessarily to full-blown enterprise products, but meeting the digital needs of midmarket and smaller enterprises as they too undergo their own digital transformations.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/12/23/scaling-email-the-heart-of-cross-channel-digital-marketing/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Adobe Systems and Clusterpoint are Intellyx customers, and Intellyx is a MailChimp customer. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers.
